Of pies and politics: The Kit-Cat Club

Founded in the late 1690s by London bookseller Jacob Tonson, utilising the premises and consuming the food of pie-maker Christopher Cat, the Kit-Cat Club evolved into a club with a cast of prominent members of the cultural, political and social circles of the time.

In origin the Club had a literary role, with Tonson regularly feeding aspirant authors at Cat’s pub in return for the promise of having first publication option on their works. Over time this evolved into the Kit-Cat Club, a pioneer in mixing politics, culture and professional interests in one Club, such areas having previously been kept separate in organisations that served but the one niche. The combination of the rich and political powerful with artists and authors in search of patronage was an effective one and, in contrast to the many highly stratified parts of society at the time, the Club was a meritocratic forum, founded and hosted by non-aristocrats.

Its place in history has suffered somewhat because, as G.M. Trevelyan put it, “All the good talk over the pies and wine, Congreve’s wit, Wharton’s fascinating impudence, and Addison’s quiet humour, is lost forever without record. The Kit-Cat Club had no Boswell”.

A lengthy work by Ophelia Field  – over 500 pages including index, along with a pointer to further information online – seeks to remedy this and concentrates primarily on five men from amongst the fifty-odd members – Joseph Addison, William Congreve, Richard Steele, Jacob Tonson and John Vanbrugh.

In politics, the Club brought together a group of influential players who pursued an ultra-Whig course, whilst in poetry, theatre and music the Club helped to shift authority from the Court both by its role in patronage for performers and artists and also by its role in setting trends in fashion and manners.

The Club’s role in Whig politics was reinforced by the Tory-Whig ‘paper wars’, with the Club’s marshalling of writers and patronage an important source of words for these propaganda exchanges. Government posts and sinecures were deployed to support Club members as part of a deliberate Whig policy to create a wider sympathetic climate of opinion. They aided supportive writers and encouraged complimentary cultural trends, including toleration, at a time when political disputes often featured questions of nationality or religion.

The presence on the throne of a Dutch King in William III also spurred the Club’s members to sketch out a strengthening of the English identity. Their choice of food – pies – was English rather than Continental cuisine, and its members looked to develop a strong English strand in the arts. The literary magazine was born from the Club’s membership, with The Tatler and then The Spectator appearing. The latter in particular championed English culture in the form of Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser. Not all their moves succeeded (an attempt to rebuff Italian opera with a new form of English opera did not take off) but sufficient were successful to help shape a new English sense of culture, including manners and styles of speaking which brought different parts of the social spectrum together rather than driving them apart.

The turn of the century saw an unusually high frequency of elections and, in a period long before the development of party headquarters, the Kit-Cat Club often acted as an informal organising point for Whigs, helping to organise and co-ordinate several key individuals who sought to exercise electoral influence. Just as electoral needs help create a role for the Club, so the later reduction in electoral pressures from the passage of the Septennial Act (which moved elections to a nominal 7-year cycle) and the dominance of the Whigs under Walpole reduced the need for the Club’s political role and helped explain its decline in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century.

Tonson’s death in 1736 marks a formal end to the Club’s life, but the changed political circumstances and the deaths of other key initial members had long since take the edge off its role.

The Kit-Cat Club certainly brought together influential people who played a major role in shaping their age, including Robert Walpole and a clutch of peers and MPs. Nine Kit-Cat members served on the 1708 commission which drew up plans for the union between England and Scotland. Three of the four members of the Whig Junto were Kit-Cat members. In 1709 a Kit-Cat held every senior post in Ireland’s colonial administration save one. For all but nine years between 1714 and 1762 the Prime Minister was a Kit-Cat Club member (and eight of those years had the brother of a Kit-Cat member in the office). And so on.

However, whilst their activities are well documented in this work, less clear is how important the Club itself was. It may have brought influential people together, but were they any the more influential for the Club’s existence? Had it not existed would their influence or the cast of influential people have been significantly different?

Many of the Club’s members were boyhood friends after all, and it is unlikely that the absence of the Kit-Cat Club would have resulted in them not continuing to know and communicate with each other via other means.

As a forum that brings together people to eat and drink (or, in the case of the Kit-Cat club, men – for it was an exclusively male enterprise), fostering personal relations, spreading news and offering opportunities, the Club provided the networking benefits that other clubs – and indeed particular schools and universities – have provided at other times. The Kit-Cat Club had a stellar cast that makes its story an interesting and lively one, but the book does not make the case that it had any special influence beyond that which numerous other networking opportunities provide.

What the book does unquestionably do though is provide detailed and enjoyable portraits of some of the individuals and activities at the centre of political and cultural life at the time. Detailed research is presented through vivid chronology as the people and their times are brought to live.

You can buy The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation by Ophelia Field from Amazon. This review first appeared in the Journal of Liberal History.